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Trench Wars Pub & Zone REVITALIZATION - Need your feedback

To All Players,

Trench Wars Staff is excited to get your constructive thoughts, responses, and feedback to regarding the potential implementation of a “new” public arena, a project that will hopefully have positive zone-wide effects. At your convenience, please take the time to read through the proposed changes and comment on any and all of the issues, problems, and benefits that you see coming from this plan. Please know that while this initial idea and a lot of the substance of it comes from me, it has been run through upper staff and they are interested in the community response to this idea.

THE PLAN
For the public arena in SSCU Trench Wars, we have truly hit a point of stagnation. Furthermore, we have hit a point of stagnation in the zone itself. The addition of dueling into the public arena has brought a new, diverse angle to the arena, keeping competitive players in the arena and not dispersing the dwindling population to multiple sub-arenas, which may further an appearance of low population, low activity, and low interest. Unfortunately, our population has hit a point of rock bottom and now, we are forced to explore the possibility of integrating further sub-arenas into the public arena in order to keep population together and hopefully foster the inclusion of new or pub-focused players into the more competitive aspects of the zone.

Similar to the addition of dueling into the public arena, we are proposing the inclusion of a ?go base game and basing “mini-game” that can be played in the public arena, but outside of the normal pub map. It has been too long that ?go base and TWBD have been virtually dead. We simply cannot support ?go base being a separate arena with the population in its current state. It is true that ?go base does run sometimes, but it’s only during peak populations and the games are often sporadic.

This full size, normal basing game will be a virtual replica of a regular ?go base game, with teams ranging from 6 to 8, and a 10 minute time-race. 5v5, which is allowed in the current ?go base, could either be included in the normal base game, or the mini-base style game, it would be something the community would have to discuss. My feeling is that 5v5 is too small and too few of people to maintain interest and activity.

The basing “mini-game” will be a mini version of a ?go base game, with teams ranging from 3 to 5. There will need to be a new miniature map developed for this, as the classic base map is too large for a mini-game. This could also be a 10 minute time race, though we could also explore lowering the time to five minutes, or even making it a point race of some sort, which would be a welcome change from the usual.

LOOKING BEYOND THE BASING
The public arena needs to be transformed to be THE only place to be, outside of playing TWD or other leagues. There is little to no reason not to also clone the javduel and wbduel maps and place them in the public arena as well. We can also include a 2v2 option for javduel and wbduel, so that when population is low, there is still a chance to get 4 players together for a quick match.

This will give us the highest participation. It will LOOK like Trench Wars is thriving, because it will be. Imagine having a pub game going on where LTs are being hunted because of their high kill streaks, while at the same time, a few competitive javs have a 3v3 javduel going on in the javduel map, which is also placed into a spot in the public arena. Population increases as the day goes on and we see a mini base game start in the new mini-base map. A few warbirds come online and start a 3v3 wbduel in the public arena. This will LOOK and FEEL like a zone that is alive, thriving, and competitive. THIS is what we want new players to see when they login to the zone. THIS is what we need players from the Steam launches to see, so that we can adequately hook these new players and assimilate them as habitual players.

WHY?
There are times when the public arena has nearly 60 people in it in the middle of a weekday. Largely, people are in spectator mode. Call it what you will -- competitive “veterans” are not interested in playing pub, people are AFK, people are bored, etc. Whatever the reason, the bottom line is that we have people online, but they aren’t playing. There’s only so long that people can sit idle in pub before being moved to the AFK arena, so we know they are around and at their computer, but they aren’t playing.

Therefore, bringing in more sub-games as part of the public arena will assist in getting those players out of spec and into the game. Furthermore, it will introduce new players or habitual pub-only players to a different, more competitive aspect of the zone, which will hopefully translate to higher participation levels in TWD, TWDT, and TWL.

The bottom line is that we have a true divide between two cultures in this zone: the pub and the competitive. There is not enough being done to bridge the gap. When the population was 600 players on any given day, both cultures could survive and thrive on their own. With our current population, we must bridge the gap and find ways to integrate both cultures into one.

ACHIEVING REVITALIZATION
If all goes well and according to plan, we can end this constant struggle of players being in spec, not interested, not playing, and logging off because of the lack of activity. We are far too dispersed right now. We have 3 players trying to make elim work, while there’s 5 players trying to fight to get a sixth to start javduel, while pub has uneven teams due to players getting frustrated and leaving. ?go base is not even played much at all anymore, and when it does, pub suffers at a historic rate, simply because of the lack of people in the arena.

We need the public arena to be the zone. At this point, with our population, scattering ourselves over several arenas and none of them being particularly successful is only adding to the death of this zone, and the dead of this game. League games (TWD, TWDT, TWL) should be the ONLY reason that someone should be outside of public arena, except for events, of course. The public arena should be the one-stop arena for non-competitive traditional pubbing, LTing, competitive basing and mini-basing, wbduel. Javduel, and dueling. The wide-array of options will re-invigorate players and GET THEM OUT OF SPEC, AND INTO THE GAME.

LIMITATIONS AND BARRIERS
Here are some of the key limitations and barriers that we see to this system being successful. We are sure that there are more problems and issues that we haven’t yet forseen, and are asking for your help on identifying those problems. Also, please give your thoughts and ideas on how we can work through these already identified limitations in order to make this work properrly.

1. Bot Coding: this is going to be a tremendous undertaking for the bot developers. It will take a lot of time, effort, and energy to implement a program like this. Furthermore, bug fixes will take time and we will need the cooperation and understanding of the community in order to get it “right.”

2. Arena Messages: this is an interesting issue. As it is now, the public arena has “a lot going on” in green arena messages, what with the pub system running the pub-basing, dueling, in addition to other sporadic messages. So how do we integrate three or four other sub-games into the pub arena without making it a huge overload and extremely confusing? The most obvious idea I’ve come up with is to tag each message at the beginning in order to identify which sub-game the message is pertaining to. It would look like this: [DUEL] too fresh challenges anyone to Javelin duel for 50000. [BASE] Freq 1 defeats Freq 0, 10:00 - 8:15. It could still become quite a bit, even with the tags. Another idea to help supplement this would be to add commands to allow players to “ignore” messages from certain sub-games that they are not interested in, including the pub-basing spam for those of you who never play it and don’t care about it.

3. Mapping: dropping current base, wbduel, javduel maps inside the existing pub arena is not a tough thing to do, but if mini-basing should come to fruition, we will need a map created for it. Not a huge deal, but I’d be lying if I said I had any sort of ability to create a map.

As stated before, we have not fully vetted all the possible issues with this system. We are hoping to hear feedback from all of you in order to fully determine the feasibility and probability of success of a program such as this.

FINAL THOUGHTS
This is a fairly drastic change to the zone as we know it. All of the games that you’re used to seeing and being able to play will still be available, but will be integrated into the public arena. Think of it just as the current duel situation is in pub, but we will be adding base, mini-base, wbduel, and javduel. This should foster more activity in pub and these sub-games and the hope is that we can assimilate more new and/or pub-only players into these more competitive aspects of the zone so that we can help our leagues flourish and grow, rather than flounder.

This is not a simple undertaking. It will require a great deal of bot coding, map making, and support from staff and players to make this get off the ground and work properly. It will take a ton of man hours for the bot coding alone, but our programmers are willing to undertake such a project in order to help the zone if there is enough public interest in giving this a real chance.

Finally, don’t be afraid of change. If you have serious issues with this idea, we would love to hear them. Don’t simply oppose it because it’s different than what we are currently doing. What we have and what we are doing right now isn’t working, and I think we can all agree on that. Let’s discuss and have an open dialogue about this proposal and determine if this is a direction the zone should go in order to halt the stagnation and setbacks that we are currently facing.

Duel Pasta> great
Duel Pasta> I spilled juice on my face

TWLB Champion Season 12
TWLJ Champion Season 11
TWLB All-Star Season 10
Best undeserved TWL title winner in Trench Wars history

I like the idea.
Indeed the zone seems to be pretty dead during the (European) mornings.
These days I've been visiting some other zones (like Devastation) where there's more going on even though there are only 4 players actually playing there. Those few players are automatically put up against each other in some basing duels which keep you playing.
It'd be good to have base/javduel/wbduel integrated as it avoids the dispersion of players in our zone. And it's often pretty hard to start javduel/wbduel/base because people can't seem to be bothered to type ?go <arena> and stay in pub.
I'm just wondering how we can cope with the fact these are games that have player-picks. And we can safely say that 70% of the spectators are usually AFK.

It's definitely a great idea worth investigating and it could give TW another little boost. We've all seen enough new players logging in who log off never ever to return again because the game was dead at the moment they connected.

TW Web Developer

4:vys> yo
4:vys> 1 day ill be staff
4:vys> know it for sure
4:vys> yo P_L already told me that i'd be ZH one day when deluge is sys op and method owns TW

It would be nice to try dif ways to create more incentive to play pub.

Like i've said before, imagine if all the spacebux was reset and you can't gain pub bux from dueling so people purely play basing to earn spacebux. Then allow the option to sell your spacebux for real cash. Like 100k for $5 or something (Some kind person could donate like $50 into the TW real bank + could be increased if more people want to donate) and people could type !jackpot or w/e to see how much real money is left to be claimed. This Will create alot of interest at any time of the day. Even if its 2 players in the arena- they could still earn spacebux inorder to sell it. Then have it so u can earn more spacebux during the times where the zone is normally dead to encourage more people to arrive at that time.

Allow this and advertise it heavily on steam. Play to be paid! Also email everyone about it.

1:Hece> iv done good A (amphetamine) many times and ppl say u cant get your dick up on it..my dick works on every chemical i have tried so far

It would be nice to try dif ways to create more incentive to play pub.

Like i've said before, imagine if all the spacebux was reset and you can't gain pub bux from dueling so people purely play basing to earn spacebux. Then allow the option to sell your spacebux for real cash. Like 100k for $5 or something (Some kind person could donate like $50 into the TW real bank + could be increased if more people want to donate) and people could type !jackpot or w/e to see how much real money is left to be claimed. This Will create alot of interest at any time of the day. Even if its 2 players in the arena- they could still earn spacebux inorder to sell it. Then have it so u can earn more spacebux during the times where the zone is normally dead to encourage more people to arrive at that time.

Allow this and advertise it heavily on steam. Play to be paid! Also email everyone about it.

I hear what you're saying, but I don't see where the never-ending stream of money is going to come from to support a plan like this. I think that we do need to add more incentives for playing pub, but that isn't the exact issue up for consideration in this thread.

Any comments on the proposal in the original post?

Duel Pasta> great
Duel Pasta> I spilled juice on my face

TWLB Champion Season 12
TWLJ Champion Season 11
TWLB All-Star Season 10
Best undeserved TWL title winner in Trench Wars history

I see this as a great plan of action as a last measure for our zone. I don't think that we are quite there yet. We just went through twl and twdt and people are taking breaks especially since xmas is around the corner. Give it time with the 2vs2 league and the competitive action should be healthier than it is now. That being said, these are the few reasons I think that this idea is a bit premature and not worth implementing right now.

1. It will be annoying to play javduel/base/wbduel because it would require extra commands in pub to join games. It would be chaos to weed through the constant spam to get anything decent going.

2. Forcing the Vets to mingle with these obnoxious spamming idiots who love to troll the competitive aspect of this game is bad. I can honestly see pubbers abusing games by joining them and rage quitting in the middle just because they feel like it. This in turn would make the existing vets play less and less.

3. The average pubber experience in this zone is at 10 years now so the fact that they do not participate in the competitive side of this game means that they do so on purpose. The few pubbers who do make the choice to play a javduel when they see the ad (fem./sonic homicide/etc.) do so willfully.

However, I do see .?go base working in this pub merger. That shitty arena has an insanely high rate of players leaving and matches never being finished. Test it out in pub and see how it goes since there is no real risk.

1:Rasaq> i scrub really hard with toilet paper so little pieces of it get stuck to my anus hair and then later on when im watching tv i like to pull them out slowly because it feels pretty good

1:Mutalisk> heard that n1111ga okyo got some DSLs

5:Eggboy32> easier is to pee in bucket and drop it on ur head and let it soak down

Paradise> No names but there's actually a black man in the arena right now.

I see this as a great plan of action as a last measure for our zone. I don't think that we are quite there yet. We just went through twl and twdt and people are taking breaks especially since xmas is around the corner. Give it time with the 2vs2 league and the competitive action should be healthier than it is now. That being said, these are the few reasons I think that this idea is a bit premature and not worth implementing right now.

1. It will be annoying to play javduel/base/wbduel because it would require extra commands in pub to join games. It would be chaos to weed through the constant spam to get anything decent going.

2. Forcing the Vets to mingle with these obnoxious spamming idiots who love to troll the competitive aspect of this game is bad. I can honestly see pubbers abusing games by joining them and rage quitting in the middle just because they feel like it. This in turn would make the existing vets play less and less.

3. The average pubber experience in this zone is at 10 years now so the fact that they do not participate in the competitive side of this game means that they do so on purpose. The few pubbers who do make the choice to play a javduel when they see the ad (fem./sonic homicide/etc.) do so willfully.

However, I do see .?go base working in this pub merger. That shitty arena has an insanely high rate of players leaving and matches never being finished. Test it out in pub and see how it goes since there is no real risk.

I know we spoke about all of this in game, but I'll address a few points right here so that others can see as well:

1. An extra command or two really is not a big price to pay when you consider the potential benefits of this change. It will require more player-input than the current setup, where you ?go javduel and are ready to be added, but I don't think that it's a tough thing for veteran players of this game to do or get used to doing.

2. There is a very small percentage of the TW population that are true blithering idiots. If you don't want to see Tower spamming his nonsense, ignore.txt him like I have for the past several years. It works great. You can do the same with any other habitual morons that are constantly spewing nonsense for no reason.

3. I think that you may be a little off base with this. There are some pub players who will venture out to sub-arenas, but it's not common. You could only name two. I refuse to believe there's only two pub players who would ever play a wbduel, javduel, or ?go base game if it was included in the pub arena and they saw them going on every day. Not to mention we have players from other zones, vets coming back to check in, etc who all would benefit from having these sub-games immediately available by SEEING them happening when they first login.

Duel Pasta> great
Duel Pasta> I spilled juice on my face

TWLB Champion Season 12
TWLJ Champion Season 11
TWLB All-Star Season 10
Best undeserved TWL title winner in Trench Wars history

I agree the zone is a whole new level of dead now - we must do something. It's obvious to me that the future is not TWD/TWL/TWDT/etc.

I posted recently about how we could focus on base/javduel/wbduel and turn off TWD altogether (because TWD is ususally what kills base). I accept even that might be too ambitious.

The minimum I need to continue playing the zone is some good basing. That could be either:
- try to get ?go base running constantly (tried, failed)
- move fully-featured ?go base into pub (I think coding makes this not feasible) (important: a mini-game wouldn't be better than pub, basing less than 7v7 is worthless)
- forget ?go base and just make pub basing better (i.e. trim the map so it only contains the base) (sounds better the more I think about it)

Yea I never got why they made a separate base.
I can understand for duels but not for base. That is just taking players away from pub where numbers are already low. Base players just want to feel special. It is obvious that some arenas need to be consolidated into pub. The only reason pub gets a bad name is because trolls love to get in a levi and terr and make basing horrible for the people in pub base from the top of the map.

It happens over and over people love to be assholes and milk kills just to make everyone elses game horrible by sitting in a spot where they can shoot into base and kill people without having any risk like when people sit in the bottom right or left hand spots and just throw shots into the bottom base to kill people.

ZH should kick these people for a short time (throw them in a safe for 10 minutes) or something for trying to ruin everyone elses game. Which is exactly what these players are doing. Admin need to take an active role and stop this. It kills population.

People want to talk shit that is fine no problem there but when they go out of their way to ruin other peoples game that shit needs to stop and there is way too much of it currently in pub that is ignored.

You all want more players?

Then do something about the trolls who only come into pub to troll people. They go to one of the safes in levi get their terr to switch freq kill them till they have the points to join then troll the entire map. When population is low this should not be allowed for levis. Make it harder for them to join up.

Lastly
Make the base not able to even give points if teams are not 5v5 at the minimum
How many times do I go into pub and its 5v1 or 5v2 and one person is afk

Normally its just people trolling pub to get points and zero is done about it. It is just people who want points for some stupid reason
These are simple bot commands so please if someone else cant fix things like this let me.

It is pointless when your team is out gunned and you have no terr or no shark and the other team has both. So of course people will go spec or just leave. This is simple stuff that people go out of their way to set up so they get points and people they dont like do not get points. They stack the teams they cheat with ping enhancers ect...

Everyone complains about too much staff but I see people stacking matches everywhere in pub and no staff correcting it.
Maybe some of you need to correct your selves before you complain about staff who work for free.

First post in a while, not sure how organized it will be but I'll try to get out everything I thought of reading this.

I've been gone for some time and came back maybe 2 weeks ago to play for a bit. I can't really be assed with TWD because basing doesn't really exist anymore and I'd find 3v3 dueling to be exceptionally boring so pub has been my thing since I got back. To me the answer to fixing the pub aspect of the game is extremely simple. Get rid of the levis. While I realize that will never happen again because the 3-5 people left that play nothing but lev will cry and bitch and moan, but those select few are the ones ruining the game for the majority. There is nothing "fun" about getting killed by a randomly lobbed lev stray from half a map away that hits a wall half a screen away or even an "aimed" camping LT. The option to !buy purepub costs too much and doesn't last nearly long enough. I'd cut the price by 50% and triple the time. Another solution could be that levis are disabled until the population is high enough to sustain them, say 10v10 for a minimum of the past 10 minutes or something similar. Anything less than that and the players that are levving are just being a nuisance for the sake of being a nuisance anyway so fuk em.

I like the idea of integrating everything into one place. A solution to your arena spam is to simply make the bot use freq messages instead. (" instead of *arena). This way a game of base, wbduel, javduel and pub could all be going on at the same time and only the appropriate freqs would be getting specific game related messages. A problem I can see that I haven't seen mentioned yet as well is score resets. All of the aforementioned subgames require a scorereset prior to the start. I know the bot can do each person individually but that's a lot more work.

Another way to liven up off hours when theres a bunch of people sitting in spec is to bring in some games that don't require leaving spec. I saw some player run trivia in pub chat the other day that was well received with his own personal pub cash as rewards for each question. Having a bot do this instead when X amount of people are interested is an option (Same for acro, boggle, etc) Giving the players the option to start this whenever they please instead of having to ask for it when ERs don't even exist anymore simply gives them another reason to stick around.

I tried to do some semi serious pub basing yesterday. I tested out some of the !buy options. Buying purepub was essential, not for me personally, but to keep the population in base instead of chasing levs or quitting outright. We ended up having some good rounds. I also noticed javduel had 20 people at the time.

I also noticed I impacted the game. People on my freq liked to win and have someone to lead them. They kept playing for ages. It's worth other basers seeing if they get the same response.

I know the population is low, but if two pubs where brought back again, would enough basers find there way back to purepub? It's the only way to not alienate players who like to levi while pleasing anti-levi players.

I may be reading you wrong raizin but I think people are talking about consolidating arena's into pub correct? Not more arenas

And yea I would like to hear from you and others higher up the tree what your thoughts are about the levi problem and the problem with people being able to get points in pub when its 5v1 or just noone on the other team and they still get points. LF made some good points.

Lets hear some feedback from staff now.
That is exacttly what people want
Sooooo
Lets hear some feedback on thoughts about this go into the teepee and meditate on solutions.

edit
Maybe this
Only pub for squads then have the base arena open only when the matches play during the season then shut those arena's back down so people have to train and interact with one another (also rising pub population) in pub?

Edit

Yea though I want to hear someone on staff justify how in pub one levi and one terr come in and its fair that they ruin the game for anyone in base shouldn't there be a minimum population or something?
Sitting at the bottom safe and throwing shots at base or flying to the top of the base and shooting at base to kill anyone in base is just horrible or do staff disagree?

Please I would love answers to these questions. People say there is so much staff lets here from staff or just other players.

Pub should definitely be made more attractive for people. It should have happened years ago. I don't think pubbux has ever been a good idea. Weasels and Levis do more harm than good. Lack of leadership with balls catered to the few levis a few years ago (actually more than a few) and so any good basing game is destroyed by lamers only thinking about themselves.

Base has doomed itself over a couple of years with 99% of the basers stacking on 1-2 squads. Basing has died because of this. Picking the best and friends while acting as captains for years has successfully weeded out any newbies entering ?go base and some random warbird from paladen or whatever who was lucky enough to get picked. Combined with the fact that people like Rab just so enjoys yelling at people, whining and quitting whilst being a terr because the team "wasn't good enough". In conclusion: the elitist attitude and dreams of receiving a pixelated medal even if it means never getting to play has deteriorated basing into a joke over the last few years.

The problem with combining base and pub is mixing 2 different people together. Cres pointed this out earlier in the thread. The problem is basically that while flagroom basing is chaotic ?go base has some sort of structure. Figure out how to make that work either with people taking the time to teach pubbers how to do it properly or just let anyone enter until it's 8v8 and game begins.

I would love to see an active ?go base arena as it were a couple of years ago. As a warbird or javelin the base games offered a fun and different competitive aspect and offered am enjoyable break to the repetitive wbduel and javduels.

I am for this idea of trying a ?go base aspect in pub. I would love to see that league up and running again and I would be absolutely happy if pub would start attracting new players. This of course takes a zone-wide effort we can't afford to be egoistical and only think about ourselves.

Originally Posted by jerome

can we stop and wonder in amazement at the fact that we play a VIDEO GAME that has "generations"???

These changes should of been done years ago, to keep the players who was already hooked.
The game is dead and there's no way of improving population IMO.

Here's my idea:- we host battle royal. A huge arena with everyone fighting in it. If you're in the red zones during the announcement and then your lifebanned. Get killed by your hunter and your lifebanned. Until there is 1 survivor and he becomes the ultimate player the game has seen...This needs to be the final event

Here's my idea:- we host battle royal. A huge arena with everyone fighting in it. If you're in the red zones during the announcement and then your lifebanned. Get killed by your hunter and your lifebanned. Until there is 1 survivor and he becomes the ultimate player the game has seen...This needs to be the final event

there is already a survivor, we call him Iron

Originally Posted by jerome

can we stop and wonder in amazement at the fact that we play a VIDEO GAME that has "generations"???